the moment the meeting was over. Then she flushed the toilet and washed her hands and eyed herself sternly in the mirror.
The very next time Dom smiled at her in that special way or looked at her as though she were chocolate-coated, she’d call him on it. They’d lay their cards on the table, establish some ground rules and move on. Problem solved.
Dom was dressing a salad when she returned to the living room.
“We’re about two minutes away. Would you mind taking our wineglasses over to the table?” he asked.
“Sure.”
She placed the wine on the coasters he’d provided and hovered awkwardly beside one of the chairs.
“Does it matter where I sit?” she asked.
“Help yourself.”
He brought the salad to the table, then served the pasta. Aromatic flavors wafted up from her meal as he placed it in front of her.
“This looks wonderful,” she said.
“I take no credit. My ma perfected this recipe over twenty years. All I did was follow instructions,” he said.
He smiled and she searched his face for any of the heated intent she’d registered earlier. But for the life of her she could find nothing apart from friendly warmth and welcome.
“You want Parmesan?” he asked, offering her a small bowl of freshly grated cheese.
She sprinkled Parmesan on her gnocchi and took her first mouthful. It really was fantastic—the tomatoes tangy, the chili providing the exact right amount of background burn. The gnocchi was light and fluffy, with the hint of something elusive in the mix.
“This is great,” she said, gesturing toward her plate with her fork.
“Yeah? Glad you like it. I made so much, you can take some home with you, save you cooking dinner.”
There was a solicitous note in his voice. She darted a look at him, ready to deliver her clear-the-air speech at the first sign of anything remotely unbusinesslike. But again he simply looked friendly and interested. The perfect business partner, in fact: cooperative, personable, intelligent.
She was on tenterhooks throughout the entire meal, waiting for a repeat of the moment by the stove. It never happened. After they cleared the table, he brought out his paperwork and notepad and got down to business in earnest. Not once over the subsequent hours did he so much as hint that he saw her as anything other than his business partner.
No hot looks. No lingering glances. No intimate smiles. Nothing except sensible, incisive business discussion.
After two hours of intense strategizing, Lucy retreated to the bathroom again.
She was confused. She’d been so sure…. The butterflies in her stomach, the pounding of her heart, the steamy intent in his eyes—was it really possible that she was so out of practice with all things male-female that she’d misread his signals? Could she have simply imagined that moment of connection? Was that really possible?
She checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror and groaned as she realized she’d spilled sauce on herself, her baby bump having obligingly caught it. She stared at the red splodge, bright against the dark of her turtleneck, like a beacon drawing attention to her belly.
“You’re an idiot,” she told her reflection.
The tension she’d been carrying with her all afternoon dissipated as she sponged her top clean, shaking her head all the while.
Call it hormones, call it nerves, call it whatever—she’d clearly misinterpreted Dom’s behavior. Of course she had. She was pregnant. Hardly an object of desire. She had to have been temporarily deranged to even entertain the idea in the first place.
Feeling calm and centered for the first time all afternoon, she returned to their meeting.
Thank God she hadn’t delivered her little speech.
CHAPTER SIX
DOM COULDN’T STOP thinking about Lucy. While he cleaned up after their lunch, he thought about how she didn’t take herself too seriously, how she liked to laugh. How smart she was in a school-of-hard-knocks kind of way.
During his run afterward, he thought about how gutsy and brave she was.
He liked her. He liked her a lot. The admiration and curiosity and attraction he’d felt for her previously had been based on what little he knew of her via their brief daily encounters at his father’s stall. Now, however, he’d seen Lucy at home, watched her interact with her sister, had numerous meetings with her, and he was beginning to understand just how special she was.
As he paused at a traffic light, he registered that he’d spent the past hour thinking about Lucy Basso. And not in a business kind of way.
Sweat ran down his back and the smile faded from his lips as he remembered the moment by the stove. He’d almost kissed her. She’d been standing so close and he’d been staring into her face and the need to taste her lips, to touch her to see if she was as smooth and warm and soft as he imagined had almost overwhelmed him.
He was a bastard. The light changed and he took off across the intersection.
The moment he’d decided to offer her a partnership, he’d known it meant the end of his chances with her. Lucy did not need her new business partner lusting after her. She needed help, support, money. Anything beyond that was simply not on the agenda. And he was a selfish prick for even letting himself go there. He lengthened his stride, angry with himself. He needed to get a grip on his attraction to her.
Ten minutes later, he slowed his pace, switched off his iPod and opened the gate to his parents’ house. His mother looked up from the kitchen table when he entered via the back door.
“Dominic! At last you come. I was beginning to forget what my boy looks like,” she said, pushing herself to her feet with an effort.
Like his father, his mother had turned into a round little barrel as she aged, her love of pasta and rich meats catching up with her. Her long gray hair was pinned on the back of her head, and she wore a voluminous apron over her dress. Her hands were dusted with flour, and she held them out from her sides as he kissed her.
“You all sweaty,” his mother said, eyeing him with concern. “You should get out of those damp clothes. Have a shower. Put on something of your father’s.”
“I’m fine. I just dropped in for a quick hello,” he said.
His mother’s lips immediately thinned.
“I never see you anymore. First you go away for six months, then you come home and still you are stranger.”
Guilt stabbed him. He had been avoiding home—or, more accurately, he’d been avoiding his father. At the market, work acted as a buffer between them, but at home there was no place to hide the fact that he and his father were barely on speaking terms.
“I’ve been busy. Work and some other things.”
His
